Wow, this totally came out of left field. Eric Schmidt just
announced that he is stepping down as Google's CEO -- a position that he has held
since August 2001. Google co-founder Larry Page will take over the CEO position
effective April 4, 2011.

For
the last 10 years, we have all been equally involved in making decisions. This
triumvirate approach has real benefits in terms of shared wisdom, and we will
continue to discuss the big decisions among the three of us. But we have also
agreed to clarify our individual roles so there’s clear responsibility and
accountability at the top of the company…

We
are confident that this focus will serve Google and our users well in the
future. Larry, Sergey and I have worked exceptionally closely together for over
a decade—and we anticipate working together for a long time to come. As
friends, co-workers and computer scientists we have a lot in common, most
important of all a profound belief in the potential for technology to make the
world a better place. We love Google—our people, our products and most of all
the opportunity we have to improve the lives of millions of people around the
world.

Although Schmidt will no longer be Google’s CEO, he will
stay on as Chairman and will serve as an advisor for Larry Page and Sergey
Brin.

quote: Now about Tony's actual point, I think you're wrong when you say that the web is going away with the browser based experience. That might be the way Apple wants us to go so they can control the content and more easily charge for it, I think the tablet will bring back the browser to the forefront.

There is value in making a custom experience for a 4" screen, but with a tablet that is almost as big as your PC screen, there is no reason for developper to make two versions of their content. I will be really surprised the day the browser, as we know it today, disapear.

I think you are right about that - tablets may bring browsing back into the centre of mobile web experience.

Google does have a problem which I didn't touch on but which as a long time user of it's search engine I have noticed and I have seen it widely commented on which is the slow deterioration of it's search results. It used to be that as long as I selected the right search term I was pretty much guaranteed to get some good results high up on page one from Google. Now I often find a lot of the top of page one is spam. Clearly there is an arms race going on here, between Google and those trying to spoof their search algorithms, and that battle waxes and wanes, currently it seems as if the spammers have pulled ahead. Google needs to make sure it pays enough attention to it's premier search engine.

Sometimes I think I can detect an inflection point looming where the benefits of algorithmic search becomes exhausted and new solutions based on social network peer recommendation and/or curated specialist search pulls ahead. Maybe Google's working just such stuff. I hope so as good search seems an irreplaceable tool nowadays. How did we cope before Google?

In a perfect world, the site I'm looking for should be the first to come up in the search results. Unfortunatly for the advertisers, this means less exposure.

Since Google is making money out of the ads, not the quality of his search results, I see a litle conflict of interests happening.

We already get the ads before the results, what's preventing Google from giving an advantage to sites that use AdWords over sites that don't?

Maybe I'm a litle paranoid, but we can name a lot of tech companies that have used shaddy tactics to help their business before, we should'nt forget that too fast.

The solution, good competition. I've already replaced half my searches with Bing and I'm sure if someone can come up with a new way to direct me to good sources of information, I could replace even more of my Google time. After all, it happened to Yahoo, it can happen to Google.